[CommonGuy]

I bought an Epson EcoTank five years ago and am very happy with it. The ink is dirt cheap.

The only downside is that you have to print something every 2-3 months, otherwise the quality degrades noticeably for the next few printouts. But after that it has always returned to normal quality for me.

[Finnucane]

If you're using a printer less frequently than every two or three months you're probably better off using a service and not having a printer. Let the maintenance be someone else's problem.

[Ekaros]

Or laser. My cheapest HP colour laser printer is over 10 years old and still works.

[grues-dinner]

Pretty sure the HP LaserJet IIIp (introduced 1989!) in my parents attic will still work if I would find a cable for it.

They definitely don't make them like that any more.

[throwanem]

They don't weigh sixty pounds, draw ten kilowatts, or top out at 300dpi and 4M of RAM any more, either.

[grues-dinner]

I mean, who doesn't love loading in the fonts manually? And it went to 4.5M of RAM, thank you very much, and definitely didn't draw 10kW, not even 1kW at maximum (but not far from it, and a cool 150W standby). And not even 55lb: sylphlike, really!

[throwanem]

Hey, don't get me wrong, I had an old LaserJet IIp back a couple decades ago and loved it dearly for the unstoppable, if often very picky and difficult, battleship that it was.

I wouldn't have it back these days, though. A LaserJet M203dw serves the same role in my current fleet, with vastly higher output quality and input flexibility, and vastly lower environment and consumable requirements; I've lost count of the book blocks I've used it to produce, and the next time it lets me down will be the first.

Meanwhile, the "finicky thoroughbred" role in my current fleet is filled by a Canon Pixma Pro 100, which takes eight easily refillable ink tanks and is extremely particular about which laptops it wants to be friends with. This is tolerable in a machine that produces gallery-quality 13x19 prints on demand, at incremental cost basically only of paper. For a document laser, it's been a long time since anything other than total imperturbability has been a reasonable expectation.

[Finnucane]

Cheap laser printer gonna suck for photo printing, though. Services are going to have way better kit than you can have at home.

[bookofjoe]

My HP B210 inkjet from 2010 works just fine.

[bookofjoe]

Strong disagree. The pain in the butt required to go to FedEx or wherever is way too big.

[throwanem]

Clean the nozzles instead, either via the driver or from the front panel. Less wasteful of consumables, and you get a test pattern after each cycle to confirm whether the head is good to go.